RE: too many Out of Office AutoReply
David wrote: The main reason is for security - you wouldn't necessarily want your competitors to be able to mail your people and find out you all went to Vegas for the weekend. Exactly for this reason I never use the out-of-the office feature. I consider it the electronic equivalent of putting the proverbial note on the frontdoor of my house stating no milk this and next week (which means dear would-be burglar, come back one of these nights, no-one will kick you out) Leen.
Re[2]: too many Out of Office AutoReply
David, Why in god's name would any email program worth 2 cents not have this feature? Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Thursday, June 28, 2001, 10:32:16 PM, David wrote: David, Thanks for the step-by-step instructions. I'm curious, though - the usual heuristic for most vacation auto-responders has been to not send responses to any message which didn't include the recipient's address in the to or cc header field. Is there a way to configure Exchange to use that heuristic? Keith At this time, there is no way to configure Exchange to do that. Most of our customer feedback has been that our current configuration scheme, which allows per-domain configuration, meets our customers' needs. Based on recent customer input (including this thread's input), we are currently evaluating adding that feature. I can't promise when it will make it into the product, but I do agree that it is a good thing to do. David --- David Lemson Lead Program Manager Exchange Server Microsoft Corporation [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
Re: Re[2]: too many Out of Office AutoReply
On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 04:08:20AM -0400, Gene Gaines wrote: Why in god's name would any email program worth 2 cents not have this feature? That's easy; for a long time (although this seems to be less true today), Microsoft apparently had a strong bias of trying very hard to hire the best and the brightest --- of people fresh out of college. Heaven forfend that they actually hire people with industry experience. As a result, a lot of things which most people would consider common sense and common practice don't actually happen until after the first couple of versions of the program are released and people scream bloody murder. (After all, good vacation hueristics have been around for well over a decade.) However, when MS Exchange finally has this feature, no doubt their marketing folks will trumpet how they invented it. After all, this is the sort of thing which is why they claim they need the freedom to innovate. - Ted
too many Out of Office AutoReply
Hi, I think this topic started somewhere because of my Out of Office AutoReply emails. Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i deactivated this function remotely. Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is usefull. I can sugest something logic: - since the tool for filtering Out of Office AutoReply on the origin will not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users using Out of Office AutoReply, the smart mailing-list mail-server should apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be always the same Out of Office AutoReply:. so, the rule would be: if subject field starts with string Out of Office AutoReply:, the mail is dropped else proceed. regards, j0rge card0s0
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
j0rge, But, that might filter some Out of Office AutoReply messages that are intended for me. A more general solution would be to look for header fields beginning X- which contains certain words. Microsoft would good. Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Friday, June 29, 2001, 9:40:03 AM, CARDOSO wrote: Hi, I think this topic started somewhere because of my Out of Office AutoReply emails. Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i deactivated this function remotely. Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is usefull. I can sugest something logic: - since the tool for filtering Out of Office AutoReply on the origin will not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users using Out of Office AutoReply, the smart mailing-list mail-server should apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be always the same Out of Office AutoReply:. so, the rule would be: if subject field starts with string Out of Office AutoReply:, the mail is dropped else proceed. regards, j0rge card0s0 --
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
Thanks for the note -- I'll resist the temptation to have procmail forward a copy of your instructions to anyone whose mailer sends such a note to the IETF list. But I'm disturbed that Exchange is using the Precedence: line as its selector mechanism. I'm hardly an email expert, but a quick grep through the RFCs turned up exactly one mention of the Precedence: header line. That reference is in 2076, which describes it as Non-standard, controversial, discouraged. No RFC definition is cited. It would be nice if such an important feature relied only on standardized headers. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
At 9:30 AM -0400 6/29/01, Steven M. Bellovin wrote: But I'm disturbed that Exchange is using the Precedence: line as its selector mechanism. I'm hardly an email expert, but a quick grep through the RFCs turned up exactly one mention of the Precedence: header line. That reference is in 2076, which describes it as Non-standard, controversial, discouraged. No RFC definition is cited. It would be nice if such an important feature relied only on standardized headers. Steve, we'll forgive you for not being an email expert. If you were one, you would know that this topic, and half a dozen of related meta-topics, have been beaten to death in the (finally dead!) DRUMS WG, and on the ietf-822 mailing list in the past six or seven years. A summary is that some implementations prefer to be strictly standards-compliant but piss off their users by not doing enough, while others choose to do things the users want even though it doesn't go strictly by the standards. In this case, there are non-standard headers in common use that give valuable heuristics to programs, and no standard ones that give the same information. Many companies, apparently including Microsoft, use that non-standard information. --Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
This solves the wrong problem. The problem is that the autoreply out of office thingy responds directly to the submitter of the listserved message, not to the listserver, so there is no filterable contact between the autoreply and the list server. Cheers...\Stef At 14:40 +0100 29/06/01, CARDOSO Jorge Miguel wrote: Hi, I think this topic started somewhere because of my Out of Office AutoReply emails. Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i deactivated this function remotely. Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is usefull. I can sugest something logic: - since the tool for filtering Out of Office AutoReply on the origin will not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users using Out of Office AutoReply, the smart mailing-list mail-server should apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be always the same Out of Office AutoReply:. so, the rule would be: if subject field starts with string Out of Office AutoReply:, the mail is dropped else proceed. regards, j0rge card0s0
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
But I'm disturbed that Exchange is using the Precedence: line as its selector mechanism. I'm hardly an email expert, but a quick grep through the RFCs turned up exactly one mention of the Precedence: header line. That reference is in 2076, which describes it as Non-standard, controversial, discouraged. No RFC definition is cited. It would be nice if such an important feature relied only on standardized headers. In this case, there are non-standard headers in common use that give valuable heuristics to programs, and no standard ones that give the same information. Many companies, apparently including Microsoft, use that non-standard information. Extension header fields are explicitly permitted by the standards, and (for better or worse) other vacation programs also recognize the Precedence field. So it's unfair to single out Microsoft for using it also. But although the heuristic is widely used, it has never been considered sufficient. Keith p.s. there are a lot of problems with Precedence, not the least of which are that it is used for at least 5 different things by different mail packages: for influencing queueing priority, deciding whether to return content in nondelivery reports, deciding whether to return a vacation message, indication of message importance, and as a loop prevention sentinel by mailing list software. There are probably others. Most of these uses do not conflict with one another, but occasionally they do. It's not exactly a robust mechanism.
Re: Re[2]: too many Out of Office AutoReply
On Fri, 29 Jun 2001 23:05:18 +0530, Ashutosh Agarwal said: I personally would like to receive some kind of ACK from the person whom I am trying to send a mailso that I am rest assured that the mail has Some of us do *NOT* like getting 15 or 20 such messages from people we have never heard of, just because we post to the IETF or Bugtraq or Incidents mailing lists. How many responses did you get to *your* posting? The IETF list is relatively clean this week - but I *have* had days when I have gotten over *200* of these Out of Clue AutoReply in *ONE DAY*. And not one single solitary one was a result of a direct mail to that recipient - all 200 were nice replies to things I posted to the list. Over and over and over. I post 4 times in one day, these things are nice enough to tell me 4 times that day that yes, George is STILL out of the office and will be for the next week. Never mind that it: 1) it SHOULD keep track of who it replied to and not reply AGAIN for this invocation of out of office. 2) it SHOULD NOT reply to mailing list postings. There *is* RFC2298 on how to get an ACK from the mail system. And guess what - it specifically says to not auto-reply if the origin seems to be a mailing list. From section 2.1: MDNs SHOULD NOT be sent automatically if the address in the Disposition-Notification-To header differs from the address in the Return-Path header (see RFC 822 [2]). In this case, confirmation from the user SHOULD be obtained, if possible. If obtaining consent is not possible (e.g., because the user is not online at the time), then an MDN SHOULD NOT be sent. /Valdis
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:25:07 BST, Lloyd Wood said: message. Apparently the Microsoft stuff is quite hard to configure well. To the point that I've *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to do it for the offending versions of 'Internet Mail Service'. Or is it permanently broken, not configurable, and the organizations afflicted with it need to be sent a 'Your clue must be -THIS- tall to ride the Internet' notice? -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech PGP signature
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
David, Thanks for the step-by-step instructions. I'm curious, though - the usual heuristic for most vacation auto-responders has been to not send responses to any message which didn't include the recipient's address in the to or cc header field. Is there a way to configure Exchange to use that heuristic? Keith
RE: too many Out of Office AutoReply
David, Thanks for the step-by-step instructions. I'm curious, though - the usual heuristic for most vacation auto-responders has been to not send responses to any message which didn't include the recipient's address in the to or cc header field. Is there a way to configure Exchange to use that heuristic? Keith At this time, there is no way to configure Exchange to do that. Most of our customer feedback has been that our current configuration scheme, which allows per-domain configuration, meets our customers' needs. Based on recent customer input (including this thread's input), we are currently evaluating adding that feature. I can't promise when it will make it into the product, but I do agree that it is a good thing to do. David --- David Lemson Lead Program Manager Exchange Server Microsoft Corporation [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
At this time, there is no way to configure Exchange to do that. Most of our customer feedback has been that our current configuration scheme, which allows per-domain configuration, meets our customers' needs. that's unfortunate. of course your customers are not the ones being harmed (at least, not directly) when their mailers inappropriately reply to messages from mailing lists. the per-domain configuration serves a different purpose - that of not disclosing your customers' absences to outsiders. that's a useful and valuable feature for those who want to enable it. it just doesn't happen to fix this particular problem. Keith
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
Is it me, or should these Autoresponders not be sending to a mailing list... I always thought that it was slapped wrists for writing a vacation type program that replied to a message like this? I notice also that ALL of the autoresponder messages come from Internet Mail Service Microsoft software No surprises there then! Actually most of them are in a funny character set windows-1252 or somthing... go on, i need a laugh, what is it? A. James Lewis ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Open Source Specialists http://www.entora.co.uk/ Tel: +44 (0)701 0723686 Fax: +44 (0)870 3214368
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 18:44:41 BST, A James Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: I notice also that ALL of the autoresponder messages come from Internet Mail Service Microsoft software No surprises there then! I used to send a canned note to people who did that, explaining that it was poor netiquette, but gave up when I noticed that: (a) 99% of the offenders were using that software (b) I have *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to configure said software to not reply to mail that comes from owner-* or *-request addresses. If somebody has a choose this tab, select that, type this cookbook, please let me know -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech PGP signature
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 02:14:15PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 18:44:41 BST, A James Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: I notice also that ALL of the autoresponder messages come from Internet Mail Service Microsoft software No surprises there then! I used to send a canned note to people who did that, explaining that it was poor netiquette, but gave up when I noticed that: (a) 99% of the offenders were using that software (b) I have *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to configure said software to not reply to mail that comes from owner-* or *-request addresses. If somebody has a choose this tab, select that, type this cookbook, please let me know I went round and round with our people about this (we have over 70 lists with over 50,000 subscribers at Internet Security Systems). Someone was finally able to tell me that recent versions of Exchange will not autorespond to messages with Precedence set to bulk but will autorespond to messages with no Precedence setting or with a Precedence setting of list. They are keying on the string, not the numeric value. All of our list messages now go out with the Precedence: bulk header to eliminate that much. Of the remainder (older versions of Outlook and Exchange), many violate SEVERAL rules of autoresponders such as never autoresponding to an autoresponder an responding more that once to a given address. If you think about it, this is a DoS attack waiting to happen. Just get a few of these and spoof messages them from each of them. :-) Fundamentally evil and fundamentally SIMPLE. And, yes, I know of one individual who actually got fed up with two particular others and did that to them. They had been warned and they set up the autoresponders anyway. They came back to over 8,000 messages and mailboxes overlimit. They blamed each other, of course, and they were right... Just for the wrong reasons. :-) And, no, it wasn't me that done that. Recent versions of Outlook, Outlook Express, and Exchange avoid both of those damaging misbehaviors as well, so it's only chumps^H^H^H^H^H^H victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husers with software that is overdue for an update. -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech Mike -- Michael H. Warfield| (770) 985-6132 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Mad Wizard) | (678) 463-0932 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/ NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471| possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!
Re: too many Out of Office AutoReply
If somebody has a choose this tab, select that, type this cookbook, please let me know and me. or post it to the list. that way I can add it to the canned text that I send out whenever I get one of those stupid vacation messages.
